The present disclosure relates to management of virtual machines (VMs) and, more specifically, to using a mobile device for VM migration.
A VM is a software implementation of a machine (i.e., a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. The VM typically emulates a physical computing environment, but requests for central processing unit (CPU), memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources are managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware. VMs are created within a virtualization layer, such as a hypervisor or a virtualization platform that runs on top of a client or server operating system. System migrations of VMs are performed for a variety of reasons, including the ability to provide a back-up system while hardware and/or software upgrades are being installed. System migrations are also performed to move the VM to a new processor or other hardware. During a VM migration, the VM that is being copied is typically referred to as the source VM and the VM that is being built as a result of the migration is referred to as the target VM. There are a variety of methods for performing the migration including halting execution of the source VM to perform the migration, and migrating while the source VM is executing.